OF all the things that should concern Chelsea and Manchester United after their indifferent starts to the season, perhaps the most troubling is the form of Leicester City. Wolves finished seventh last season with 57 points, nine adrift of Manchester United in sixth. The early evidence this season is that that gulf from seventh to sixth may be nowhere near as vast as it has recently been.
Even towards the end of last season, there were signs of how Leicester were developing. Jamie Vardy remains a potent finisher, a tireless worker and hassler of defenders whose pace, even at 32, means opponents are wary of leaving too much space behind them. The problem for opposing defences is that the deeper they sit, the less pressure they put on Leicester’s extremely classy and creative midfield. And if you give Youri Tielemans and James Maddison space, they will pick you apart.
“If there’s no space in behind, it’s hard to counter, so then you have to be good in front of the ball,” Brendan Rodgers explained last week. “That was part of the reason to bring me in and to see if we could evolve the playing style. There’s still a lot of work to do. There’s still a lot of improvement. We need to be better at sustaining attacks. We’ve got young players that are very exciting in the final third of the pitch, so when they arrive in there, we need to sustain attacks.
Leicester City manager Brendan Rodgers has been nominated for the Premier League Manager of the Month for August. The Foxes are unbeaten so far this season. #LCFC pic.twitter.com/XjLiUaGHyA
— BBC Leicester Sport (@BBCRLSport) September 6, 2019
“We look to penetrate all the time. We need to have longer periods with the ball. We’re improving in that aspect. The next couple of years will be about being able to do everything. The best teams in this league, if you look at Man City and Liverpool, they can counter-attack at speed, they can trap you in a sector of the pitch and keep circulating the ball. And when they lose it, they’re brilliant in transition. For us, we’re becoming an aggressive team, which is good. We’re still very good on the counter. We’re getting better in the possession phase and we’ll look to constantly make that better.”
It's worth quoting him at length, in part because it’s so rare to hear a manager explaining his strategic thinking. Rodgers was always generous in that regard, clearly fascinated by the game and quite happy to share his insights with the media and by extension the public. But there’s also the tone. There’s a self-belief that, along with that line about why *he* was brought in could, in the wrong context and with prolonged exposure, have an echo of the old David Brent caricatures. But more fundamentally there’s an authority and a clear fascination with the mechanisms of the game.
It would be absurd to criticise or mock that but then you wonder how different it was from some of his pronouncements at Liverpool. Has Rodgers changed, or is it just that as Leicester manager he is less in the public eye and so the cumulative effect is less? Or perhaps it’s simpler even than that: the measured tone and the detailed explanations look impressive when results are good, but tend to make the manager look a little silly when results go against him.
Jamie Vardy’s record under Brendan Rodgers:
✅ 14 Games
⚽️ 12 Goals
2 Assists#FPL #LCFC pic.twitter.com/EoK7wgbekj
— FPL Pirate (@FPLpirate) September 4, 2019
What is certainly true is that many of the positive aspects of Rodgers’s management are in evidence at Leicester. There is a buoyancy about the place, something fostered by the manager’s confidence. There have been the subtle tweaks to the shape of the side: 4-1-4-1 in three games, but more of a 4-3-1-2 at Sheffield United; Maddison used on the left against Wolves and Chelsea, as a number 10 at Bramall Lane and through the centre against Bournemouth; Ayoze Perez used sometimes on the left and sometimes as a centre-forward.
This weekend, Leicester go to Manchester United in another test of their credentials. They’ve already drawn at Stamford Bridge, exposing Chelsea’s openness through midfield. Given how Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is obsessed with United playing on the counter, this is likely to be a game in which the creativity of Maddison and Tielemans will be key.
But it’s telling of how opinions have shifted that this almost feels like a bigger trial for United. Leicester can go to Old Trafford with a sense of excitement and possibility; for United it is a game to be got through without sustaining too much damage. And if Leicester do win, Rodgers will delight in telling the world how his team managed it. Some may find that grating, but he probably shouldn’t be begrudged.
